Dead, dead and never called me mother

In San Antoni I dropped my iPhone into the water.

Vale Navionics, iSailor, Wikipedia offline and all manner of accumulated electronic goodies. The last straw for this poor old fart. (It might be the last straw, but it isn’t the end of the world – we have many backup programs on 3 computers and a chart plotter, in addition to replication on the iPad too). But being without the phone makes me realise though, how pathetically dependent I have become on this little toy.

One of Banksy’s acolytes has done a depressing painting of an iPhone with tentacles, spreading over a hand and down the arm. That’s my arm.

But the iPhone is a very useful navigation tool at sea. In Tainui we do not have a chart plotter shrine on the steering pedestal. So the little iPhone sits with the navigator on the aft companionway hatch giving instant information.

It also repeats AIS information from our Vesper WiFi transponder, tide charts and all manner of useful data. From the cockpit we can see the radar and chart plotter screens below, but that phone in the hand is just great for downloaded weather files (PocketGrib and Yr.No are our favourites), ticking off buoys, checking bearings and distances off, and watching soundings approaching anchorages.

I also have a complete 4 GB Wikipedia Offline on the phone. This has transformed those late night arguments, debates and unanswered questions which occupy the crew during happy hour and long night watches. They have now all gone – a mixed blessing I suppose, but there are still too many unanswered questions remaining.

Finally, this phone of mine contained podcasts of 10 years of New Yorker short fiction, together with more music than you could listen to in 2 transatlantic crossings.

Now that’s all on the bottom of San Antoni harbour and I am feeling a bit bereft. Especially when a 64 GB replacement phone cannot be had anywhere in the Balearics.